7 ways artificial intelligence can increase productivity

Artificial intelligence isn’t coming for your job, but the people who know how to use it are.

A quick Google search and browse through LinkedIn reveals that everyone has something to say about the need for companies to start using artificial intelligence. They say it’ll make work more efficient, companies more profitable, and reduce overwork for employees. 

However, very few people tell you exactly how to put it into practice and achieve those benefits.

This means it’s up to you to figure out how to use AI to your advantage. You need to cut through the noise, understand its applications and benefits, and decide on the best ways to make it part of your processes. 

In this post, you’ll learn how to use artificial intelligence to increase productivity—and free up people to concentrate on the high-value tasks humans do best. We’ll discuss seven kinds of work it can do, as well as suggest specific AI tools that can help. 

Spend less time on mundane tasks and more on strategic thinking.
Switchboard keeps everything and everyone organized in one place—so you can focus on collaboration, not admin. 
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How can artificial intelligence improve workplace efficiency?

The way artificial intelligence improves workplace efficiency boils down to two things—saving time and reducing error. It means people can work their way through their to-do lists of simple, routine tasks more quickly and with fewer mistakes. That gives them more time to dedicate to the engaging, high-level work that AI can’t do, like relationship-building, collaborating, innovating, and creative problem-solving.

As Global Technology Industry Researcher and Strategist David Smith puts it: “AI is going to be the assistant you’ve always wanted… it’ll take care of all the mundane things and allow you to be the expert that you are.” 

Basically, businesses that successfully use AI for competitive advantage delegate lower-level work to the tools. Then, team members can devote more of their time, energy, and mental space to the important stuff that will drive the business forward.

Now, let’s consider some specific tools and tasks that artificial intelligence can help organizations with to improve team productivity.

More efficient communication and collaboration

Collaboration is a real paradox. Companies need to do it well to be successful, but it can be a time sink if not done right. According to a recent McKinsey report: “Every minute spent on low-value interaction eats into time that could be used for important, creative, and powerful activities.” 

Let’s explore how your team can recoup some of those valuable minutes.

1. Quicker admin and internal comms

According to Axios HQ, leaders spend as much as three to ten hours every week preparing essential communications for employees. This harms workplace productivity as people spend too long just exchanging information with each other when they could be digging into higher value work.

Fortunately, this is an ideal AI business use case as it can speed up internal communication and information-sharing. For example, a member of your sales team could use Otter.ai’s new OtterPilot smart meeting assistant to automatically record a transcript of a conversation with a lead. Then, they can pass it on to product marketing so they can adjust their strategies. The tool can even generate sales insights related to budget, needs, and timeline. 

If you’re using Switchboard as a team collaboration tool, you can also save the transcript in your dedicated, persistent room so people can access it anytime.

Switchboard can also automatically produce short, actionable summaries of any transcripts, web pages, or documents that you put in a room. That makes it easy for team members to get straight to the point and process all the information they need to know to participate in meetings meaningfully.

2. Smart scheduling

Modern workers don’t only spend too much time in meetings—they also spend too much time organizing them. In fact, people regularly spend up to 30 minutes just managing their meetings. That encompasses all of the back and forth associated with finding time slots where everyone’s available and rescheduling when conflicts come up.

There are several platforms that use AI to reduce that time-consuming work, for instance:

• Sales engagement platform Mixmax makes it easy for people to schedule meetings by allowing them to insert their calendar availability into emails and sending out automatic reminders so no one forgets to attend.
• Appointment scheduling software Calendly’s round-robin feature means the platform can optimize scheduling meetings based on who’s available and when.

Of course, because Switchboard saves all your work, it’s easier to communicate and work async. That means you can cancel more meetings—or shorten long ones—and get back time for focus work that way. 

3. Writing and editing

When ChatGPT kicked off the race to corner the market in generative AI, writing and editing were some of the use cases that people talked about the most frequently. Many shouted from the rooftops that they could come up with entire blog posts in minutes or pages of social media captions in seconds.

Artificial intelligence shouldn’t be used to replace human writers—and currently can’t keep up with them in terms of research, accuracy, context, first-hand experience, original thinking, or tone of voice. However, AI can help product marketers speed up repetitive writing and editing tasks like generating simple website copy. This frees them up to concentrate on better understanding what your customers want. If they’re struggling to find writing inspiration, artificial intelligence can help there too. 

Let’s consider a few specific examples:

• Use Grammarly’s generative AI tool to rewrite text in different tones of voice. Drafting an email to a new freelancer? Tell it to sound more professional. Preparing your department updates for the next day’s team meeting? Tell it to sound more enthusiastic and light-hearted.

• Try Copy.ai to help with writer’s block and get your creative juices flowing. Upload text that represents your brand voice, let the platform analyze it, and Copy.ai will come up with new content that’s in line with your preferred tone. Then, edit, tweak, and revise as necessary.

• Put OpenAI (aka ChatGPT) to work if you’re having trouble coming up with ideas or examples in a brainstorming session. You’ll need to review and fact-check what the tool comes up with, but ChatGPT can be a great “second brain” if you’re all tapped out in terms of creativity.  For example, a product marketer might ask ChatGPT: “I’m building a go-to-market strategy for a new feature. What are three surprising ideas for introducing a new feature to the market?”

Task automation

Many professionals shudder in horror when they think about taking an old-school approach to office work—typing data into spreadsheets, creating reports by hand, and moving calendar events manually every time a conflict comes up. Thanks to tech advancements and more sophisticated AI tools, those can be things of the past.

4. Data entry and analysis

There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence excels at processing and analyzing large amounts of data quickly and accurately. That means people with jobs like data entry professionals, budget analysts, tax preparers, and technical writers will be heavily affected by AI advances, according to a Pew Research Center. That doesn’t mean those professionals will necessarily find themselves out of work, but their jobs will change. 

Artificial intelligence tools are also great at telling people what pages of data really mean and presenting that information in easy-to-understand formats. That means workers with jobs that rely on data analysis may end up shifting their focus to more strategic, high-level work like nailing down growth opportunities, understanding new market dynamics and trends, and flagging issues and threats. 

For example, tools like Amplitude AI can give your team intelligent recommendations on how to clean up data. Not to mention that it can create graphs automatically and explain how to interpret them. 

Like all your favorite apps, Amplitude works inside your Switchboard room with no need for integrations. Just add what you need to the room with a simple copy-paste and get working. Everything’s multiplayer so you can work side by side in real time or make progress async.

5. Project management

Top-notch project management is key to any successful business. How else can companies make sure they reach their goals, stay in touch with their clients and partners, and have their deliverables ready on time?

Indeed, the Project Management Institute found that mature project management processes made organizations much more likely to deliver on time and under budget.

Despite that, project managers frequently find themselves stuck in a loop of repetitive admin work. That’s one reason why well-known project management platforms like Asana are coming up with and leveraging artificial intelligence features like these:

• Smart summaries. Get automatic action items and summaries of conversations, tasks, and comments.
• Smart fields. Auto-generate custom fields related to budget and priority, for example.
• Smart workflows. Create personalized, ready-to-implement workflows that are optimized based on business goals and best practices.
• Smart answers. Ask Asana questions about projects, blockers, and next steps in natural language and receive quick answers. ‍
• Smart status. Download AI-generated status reports based on real-time work data.

Better planning and decision-making

Of course, we don’t recommend that companies use artificial intelligence to make decisions on behalf of their business. However, it can do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of predicting potential future scenarios and suggesting possible courses of action. 

6. Predictive analytics

Similar to data analysis, artificial intelligence also has a knack for understanding what’s happened in the past and using that information to anticipate what may lie ahead. In the case of machine learning models, AI can even make predictions based on patterns, nuance, and experience rather than hard data. Businesses can then use those insights to plan, prioritize, and allocate their resources.

For instance, Amazon Forecast uses artificial intelligence to predict customer demand for different products based on things like historical sales data, seasonality, pricing changes, and customer behavior. This is ideal for retail businesses to plan their inventory and their marketing campaigns.

7. Better resource and workload allocation

No matter what industry you work in, you’ve likely struggled to figure out how to organize your existing resources so you’re using them to their fullest potential. It can also be tricky to figure out how to allocate work so everyone’s at maximum productivity while still avoiding burnout. 

Imagine you have 15 full-time employees on your product team and three new features to launch this month. It’s up to you to determine how to arrange everyone’s workflows so you get all deliverables finished without anyone being overworked or overwhelmed.

While you would have previously had to work that out manually, platforms like Forecast leverage AI so you can plan effectively and make the most of your existing resources. It can tell you what’s worked well in the past and make personalized suggestions for what to change this time around. Similarly, it can automatically alert you about potential risks like being behind schedule or under budget.

Artificial intelligence: The key to increasing productivity 

What everyone is saying is true: If you aren’t already, then you need to start using artificial intelligence. 

But you already knew that. 

What’s even more vital is to understand the potential impact it can have on your team, company, and industry. You also need to know how to apply it to benefit your organization and employees and give you an advantage over the competition.

That way, rather than being threatened by AI, you can use it as yet another tool that can help your team thrive. When you automate intelligently, team members can spend less time on repetitive, routine tasks and more on innovation, creative thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration. Employee productivity is the backbone of any successful business—and AI technology is an important way to achieve it.

Another is to use Switchboard as your home base for real-time and async collaboration. When you keep everything–and everyone–organized in persistent project or meeting rooms, you can save time hunting for information, sharing updates, and switching between tools and tabs. You can also cancel more meetings and make the ones you do have more productive. 

Spend less time on mundane tasks and more on strategic thinking.
Switchboard keeps everything and everyone organized in one place—so you can focus on collaboration, not admin. 
Learn more